Across different industries, departments have remained siloed. Times have been changing and there is now greater collaboration. Involving marketing in the sales process and vice versa. However, certain financial corporation are not breaking down these silos when it comes to marketing. At the enterprise level, there’s an opportunity to better leverage their advisor teams. When an enterprise is able to engage their sales team in the digital marketing efforts, the result is a win-win-win.

Winning for head office

With budgets that are being reduced and goals that increasing, it can become increasingly difficult for the marketing team to meet objectives. Including advisors in the marketing process will result in the marketing team growing exponentially with each advisor being able to market to their audience in the best way. It’s a big win for the enterprise in expanding the reach of their brand via the propagation of their content across each of their sales agents digital domains. With the increased in reach of marketing activities, naturally, the enterprise sees a lower cost per lead resulting in a higher ROI for their marketing spend.

Winning for Advisors

While advisors are experts in what their field; they may lack the time, knowledge, or ability to engage in new marketing techniques beyond outbound methods such as cold-calling or traditional advertising. Some advisors may have tried online marketing in the past but didn’t get the results they were hoping for. In providing advisors the platform to be apart of the marketing process. This is a win for the field agents as they will be gaining new economies of scale. They will be able to use the corporate marketing messaging that is relevant to their business and can augment it by creating their own material. The scale of this new marketing abilities could have never attained by way of traditional marketing techniques.

Winning for Clients

Consumers are now demanding a greater access to information. Instead of being educated by a sales-person, they are educating themselves before initiating contact with a company. Furthermore, there exists a distrusts for faceless organizations. If clients can establish a relationship with the corporation they are more open to doing business. Therefore, implementing a marketing strategy that includes advisors is also a win for the client or prospective client. They will have a better understanding of the value of the brand and the offerings. A level of trust and empathy will be established with the advisor that was not previously possible. The reason this was not possible is that the enterprise would market to the prospective client and even if they were convinced, they would not have an advisor to contact. Now, both relationships with the brand and the advisor are built through digital means during the education phase.

In Conclusion

Once the advisor teams have been brought in, it gets really interesting with respect to what avenues each of them takes. Some may jump right into blogging and pumping out article after article to that specific niche they want to target. Others will become social media wizards and engage on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. in spreading their expertise and thought-leadership. While others may just appreciate the ability to leverage the enterprises’ content to stay top of mind with their audience and ensure they’re keeping a regular tempo of communications.

Digital Experience Platform, DXP, is an emerging category of enterprise software seeking to meet the needs of companies undergoing digital transformation, with the ultimate goal of providing better customer experiences. DXPs provide an architecture for companies to digitize business operations, deliver connected customer experiences, and gather actionable customer insight. Organizations are looking to use DXPs as they move from web-centric to more pervasive, multichannel digital experiences. DXPs manage the presentation layer based on the role, security privileges and preferences of an individual. They combine and coordinate applications, including content management, search and navigation, personalization, integration and aggregation, collaboration, workflow, analytics, mobile and multichannel support. Using Gartner’s Magic Quadrant can help find the most suitable vendor for their needs.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is organized in 4 quadrants: Niche players, Challengers, Visionaries, Leaders. These groupings are created based on the two platform characteristic axes: ability to execute, and completeness of vision. Let’s examine a vendor from each quadrant to highlight some of their strength and weaknesses

Kentico Software

Strengths

Growth: Kentico is an emerging European vendor and have expanded rapidly.

Midmarket focus: Its appeal is to midsize business looking for packaged capabilities.

Price: Offers a clear and predictable licensing model at a low starting cost.

Cautions

Interoperability: while advertised for out-of-the-box solutions, it is difficult to integrate with third-party offerings.

Limited support: Customers report relatively low satisfaction with the quality, effectiveness and availability of professional services in the Kentico ecosystem.

Oracle

Strengths

Functional breadth: Offering a broad array of digital experience functionality, and a wealth of complementary technologies.

Product integration: Integration of Personalization with Experience is a work in progress. Some customers report unmet expectations regarding combined features and functions.

Scalability: Customers report limitations with complex security and authentication scenarios when its platform is used in intranet and extranet scenarios.

Access to expertise: Customers have reported a steep learning curve and difficulty finding expertise for implementation.

Analysing the strengths and weaknesses are very important in the research of new employee portal. Organizations must examine how they fit into objectives of a platform transformation. There are other criteria an organization should consider, such as: understanding the employee needs, involving all departments, testing and more. To read more about what should be considered read our last article: Why Your Old Employee Portal Is a Problem?

For the past several weeks, we have been examining the opportunities that financial institutions have been missing out on. With a large team of advisors, a corporation should utilize this large team to provide powerful marketing content. In utilizing this advisor network, marketing efforts can be hyperlocalized, personal, and grow client-advisor relationships. Instead of the traditional marketing approach that is focused on brand awareness. Digital Agent is an enterprise marketing solution that enables the enterprise to amplify marketing efforts by leveraging their network of advisors to distribute relevant content to their unique audience. By engaging in this model, advisors have been seeing transformational results through increased web and email engagement, resulting in an increase in leads. Let’s walk through each one of these:

Web Engagement Results

It is understood that the way companies communicate with prospects and clients has evolved. Where mass-messaging used to work, now clients demand a more personal relationship and valuable information. For advisors on the Digital Agent platform, they have seen a 100% increase in web engagement. Advisors are seeing such results by adopting a blogging strategy that helps to build trust and credibility.

Email Engagement Results

Similarly, advisors who engage in an email marketing strategy are seeing a 150% increase in email engagement. For advisors on the Digital Agent platform received an average email open rate of 38% while the industry average is 21%. Furthermore, the click-through rate is at 17% while the industry average is only 2.75%. Finally, visitors to an advisor site that is on the Digital Agent platform see an average of 7 minutes spent on the site. Advisors will have a strong understanding of what financial concerns people have in their area and will provide valuable content to those people and have a real person they can speak with that understand these needs.

Lead generation

While creating enhancing marketing efforts is important, the most important for financial institutions is new client acquisition. Those on the Digital Agent platform have seen an average of 70% of new form submissions are inbound leads. Additionally, an advisor who is passively creating marketing content is getting an average of 1-2 new leads per month. An advisor that is actively creating a digital engagement routing through consistent marketing is getting on average 5-10 new monthly leads.

One wealth management advisor from a leading Canadian bank, adopted a blogging strategy a year ago and recently told us that he finds that leads that come through his website are more qualified. In initial meetings, prospects know more about who he is and the blog articles that he’s written, making initial meetings more productive and a better client and prospect experience overall.

Conclusion

DuringThe Business Case for Transforming your Advisor Marketing, we explored the challenges enterprise marketers face in trying to achieve growing results with tighter budgets. One of the best ways to meet these requirements is the leverage the advisors. They are an enterprise marketer’s team of experts in financial matters, and they know the clients. When financial enterprises empower their advisors through Digital Agent, they will ensure brand consistency and compliance, all while marketing metrics surpass industry averages and bring in more leads. Ultimately, Digital Agent has been proven to lower overall lead costs and increase the number of leads and the quality of leads that advisors are generating.

Ready to learn how to get started? Talk to us on how best to start seeing these results in with your advisors.

The leading organizations of any industry are looking to pull ahead of the competition with digital-driven models. A key to success here is not only improving interactions with customers but also with employees. The value creation that a proper internal digital strategy and renewed intranet portal related capabilities can deliver are: end-to-end agile operating models, gains to internal productivity, reduction in the times to market for new products, and enhanced employee experience. To achieve these benefits, organizations need to invest in delivering the next generation of digital experience platforms that deliver on key employee journeys that promote employee engagement as well as customer facing journeys and engagement.

What Organizations Should Be Doing

While customers are the lifeblood of any organization, ignoring the employees and their journey is foolish as they are the providers of the product or service. Investing in the employee experience and platforms they use can have a great impact on the overall service to those customers. Firstly, aim to solve real employee problems that impede the customer and employee experience and look at how to provide those powerful employee experiences. Secondly, be open and allow for new ways of working in a more agile fashion and work across silos. Thirdly, organizations need to provide a more modular flexible architecture for a faster time to market and more business agility. Finally, organizations need to capture benefits and results on different KPI at all levels.

Legacy Portals Aren’t Working Anymore

While organizations may speak about being agile in the digital age, legacy employee portal solutions and their corresponding business cases and funding models were not designed for the type of digital enablement being delivered in the most progressive organizations. Here are some of the symptoms of your portal not working:

Current portal solutions that only provide individual features and not the entire end-to-end employee journeys.

A portal that was a one-time project funded vs. ongoing funding.

A monolithic architecture that was hard to change with limited ability to personalize.

Don’t stay static

Organizations that refuse to let go of their legacy technologies are preventing themselves from moving forward and getting to where they want to be. Stakeholders must first recognize that elevating the digital journey of the employees is just as important as elevating the digital customer journey. The organization must be committed to changing how they work, driving simplification and fostering a new culture of digital employee engagement.

How does your team ensure that emails, documents, content, communications can easily be retrieved if and when necessary? Would it be stressful trying to track down all the emails, files, conversations and log of everything that happened related to that piece of content? Instead, the process could be stress-free if there was an automated archiving system in place. There would be no worry or stress because knowing all the content, the compliance reviews, and external content have all been captured and can be found with high accuracy.

What is Auditing?

Auditing is the process of collecting and examining an organization’s (or individual’s) records and content. This process is to determinate the information is both accurate and in accordance with any rules, regulations, and laws. Internal audits are conducted by internal employees to examine records and are aimed to improve internal processes such as operations, controls, risk management, and governance. External audits are performed by auditors from outside an organization to provide an independent opinion.

Benefits of Performing an Audit

Ultimately, the benefit of performing an internal audit is the protection of assets and reducing exposure to risk. Other key benefits of conducting an internal audit are:

Improving efficiency in the process

Ensuring compliance

The scope of the audit is defined by internal stakeholders

Reports are presented to internal stakeholders ensuring a level of privacy

Establishes monitoring procedures

Identifies redundancies

Increases accountability

Can serve as an early detection system, allowing for timely corrections of issues.

Moving into Digital

The traditional internal audit process is both time consuming and is susceptible to errors. The typical workflow begins with the auditor collecting data. This is what happens when an internal audit takes place

Manually search through raw data such as emails, documents, spreadsheets, for the information required or submit a request for that information. This manual search brings productivity to a halt as it is very time intensive and becomes stressful because information may not be easily found or is missing entirely.

When submitting a request for information, the request will take days even weeks to pull the data. Once the data is pulled, it may still be in its raw form, not in a format that can easily be reviewed.

The auditor would need to sort through mountains of data or have it been organized into a report which takes even more time

Finally, with all this data and the sort time frame caused by all the effort spent gathering, the auditor will get stuck in comparing raw figures rather than taking a more analytical approach and providing valuable strategy and insight.

With a modern platform, all the archived data is found in one user-friendly place that allows for accuracy in what the auditor is searching for. Reducing the turnaround time for information gathering allows the auditor to examine the raw data, and have the time to extract valuable insights and develop strategies.

To effectively engage customers in this digital age, you need to support their buyers’ journey. Supporting this journey will require content distribution and authoring strategies that help your field teams connect with customers in a more human way. As marketers, we are all trying to get leads. Except budgets and teams are not growing. So, marketers must produce more with less. How can marketing budgets be stretched to deliver growth while reducing the cost of acquiring new customers?

Traditional budget allocation is heavily focused at the enterprise level. Content is created by the enterprise and broadcasted to all customers and potential clients. As we discussed in our previous article,Three Opportunities Enterprise Marketers are Missing Out On, This means that micro-segments and customers in local markets are less engaged with the content. Those missed opportunities include personalized email engagement, hyper-localized content, and the customers to connect with advisors.

Rebalancing the marketing budget to have a larger focus on distribution will empower field employees. Using a content distribution platform, enterprises can access the field to leverage them for marketing efforts. This allows messaging to reach a larger number of customers that will be provided better value and results in stronger engagement.

By empowering advisors allows for the engagement activities closer to the clients and prospects. By doing so, advisors will be able to create valuable personalized content that is relevant to local markets. When financial advisors are actively involved in the distribution of marketing content there is significant growth in online engagement and more qualified leads for the advisor. So why aren’t more companies implementing this kind of strategy and rebalancing for favor distribution?

They couldn’t if they wanted too.

Platform vendors aren’t developing this strategy. The major vendors are designed for the head office marketing teams. These vendors cannot provide these platforms to all their field agents, both because it would be too costly, and it wouldn’t allow to ensure compliance and brand consistency.

It’s hard to break tradition

As mentioned, budgets are small, and requirements of marketers are growing. So, changing up is “working” can be worrying.

Fear of change

Changing the way funds are allocated can cause fear for marketers. As shifting around budgets and implementing new processes and platforms will involve other major stakeholders. The new changes will need to be justified as a better approach than the traditional budget.

Who is Doing This Already?

While most organizations know the importance of providing valuable content to their customers. However, fewer companies have implemented the proper tools to leverage a successful distribution strategy. Some of these companies include RBC, American National, UBS, Mortgage Master, Manulife, CIBC, Morgan Stanley, and others.

With the realization of this problem and the opportunity that exists, what can you do? First, begin by re-examining your marketing budget. Where can distribution benefit you? Than explore possible vendors and run a pilot to test your new thesis. Remember, not all vendors are created equal, while the goal may be similar, certain platforms focus on social media, emails, legacy systems, or integrated solutions. Finally, find a vendor that offers internal distribution platforms that best suits your needs.Our product, Digital Agent is one of the platforms that allows enterprise marketers to achieve that distribution strategy and empower advisors while ensuring content and brand compliance.We hope you find the platform that will allow you to transform your advisor marketing programs. If you wish, we’d love to speak with you further about how you can lower your cost for lead generation.

An employee portal can be very beneficial for an organization. Portals continually prove to increase employee and business productivity, as well as improve communications, collaboration, and knowledge management. However, in discussions with different organizations, they face common challenges as to why their existing portals aren’t working. 40% of portal initiatives fail to garner adequate adoption to achieve ROI and 10% to 15% of portal initiatives are scrapped altogether.(Gartner Summit 2012) So why are existing portal not working?

Poor User Adoption

While the enterprise stakeholders have seen the value in a new portal. The employees may have a different perspective. They may see little value in the portal and see it as an inconvenience in their established processes and routines. This creates an inconvenience to the employees to get that data that can be easily found somewhere else.

Unable to Easily Search for Information

The implementation of a new portal should make processes simpler. There can exist a disconnect between what stakeholders were described when sold the portal, and the employees who must use it for a specific reason. These reasons may conflict with the abilities of the portal. Regardless of the application, the goal is to effectively find the information needed. The specific information may take too long to find what they’re looking for, unable to do a keyword search, or searches get too many results that then require sifting through.

Inability to Collaborate

These portals are designed to try to enhance the overall productivity of an organization. It should become easier for any employee in an organization to work with others across departments and access an online workplace, despite their physical location. New portals may make collaboration difficult or altogether impossible. Employees can’t share documents, cannot work on the documents on it together, and there is no control over with document versions.

Ineffective Communication

Finally, another common problem faced with the adoption of new portals is the breakdown of communications. Their portal has no streamlined process, no ability to communicate or a lack of knowledge of where to post information.

The challenges mentioned above are symptoms that stem from three problems that are present in all ineffective employee portals: Information, Ownership, and Customer Experience:

Information

Is the information outdated? As time goes on information may not be kept up to date or have little to no metadata tagging to help search information.

Ownership:

Who is supposed to be updating content, when, and how often? What information should be posted?

Customer Experience:

Portals may lack a focus on the end user. It may not be intuitive to navigate or lack analytics on how they are interacting with the portal. Having KPIs for portal software is important to track the value to the organization.

A lot needs to be considered and understood when designing a successful solution. Its simply not enough to say “we want to increase collaboration”, organizations should also ask what collaboration means to the users and how it it involves their daily activities. Other questions include: What does a successful implementation look like? What are the plans to maintain adoption? Overall, we need to account for how people work and why they would want to change it to a new portal.

Email marketing is not something new. It has been since shortly after the invention of email itself. We all remember being copied and pasted on email threads of anyone and everyone they knew to send them some funny joke or chain letter. You would open them because you received it from a person, someone you know and like and trust. The key thing to note is that people open emails from people more than they do from brands.

According to the Data & Marketing Association, it takes between 7 to 13 touches to deliver a qualified lead. When an advisor’s goal is to generate leads, creating this many touch points can be time-consuming and costly. Email marketing has been proven to help develop trust and credibility by sending prospects and clients the right content at the right time that is relevant to them. Of all the marketing channels, email has been proven to generate the highest return on investment. There are case studies that walk through exactly how this can be done.

As an enterprise marketer, you most likely have an email distribution tool that you send emails to clients who have opted in to receive your emails. But what about all the people who have been researching your brand or all the people that are connected in one way or another to a financial advisor. Advisors are trying to leverage best practice email tools like MailChimp or Constant Contact to stay in touch with their network but these emails might not follow compliance rules and regulations.

By enabling advisors to email their clients and prospects through a compliant platform where messaging is approved, they can still create a personalized local approach. Their emails can reference local events, news, and tie them to articles they write.

When advisors adopt an email strategy, we see that email results are higher than the industry average, as well as corporate email newsletters. People tend to open more emails and be more engaged with by clicking and reading on multiple articles.

5 Reasons Why Email is a Must

Nurture LeadsAdvisors most likely have contacts in their database that are not leads. In order to turn these prospects into clients one day, advisors need to be continuously nurturing them with expert advice and thought leadership. If they have not unsubscribed from the email list, that means they are still interested in hearing what you have to say.

Learn about your Audience and let them Learn about youAs advisors write and distribute content they are building trust and credibility. Prospects and clients are getting to know who the advisor is and what their views and approach is to certain topics. On the flipside, as prospects and clients interact with email content by sharing and clicking on articles, the advisor learns what topics are of interest and relevant to their audience. This is important so advisors can write articles that their audience cares to read.

Fill up your Calendar with AppointmentsEach time an email newsletter is sent out to an advisor’s community, there is an opportunity to book appointments with clients or prospects. A client could call or email to book an appointment after reading an article. Similarly, an article might spark some interest with a prospect that could result in a booked meeting. Every digital interaction with a prospect could bring them one step closer to making initial contact.

Keep in Touch with Past ClientsSometimes there are circumstances that take place where an advisor might lose clients. Some scenarios could be moving to a new city. With these older clients, there is an opportunity for referrals that shouldn’t be ignored.

Reach a Wider AudienceWith new technology, it’s very easy for people to share contact they consume. Though email it can be easily shared on social media channels or forwarded to someone new.

In conclusion, the successful savvy advisor is already doing some version of this already. If you are not currently taking advantage of the opportunity to email customers you are missing out on ways to connect your audience. Remember, if clients and prospects are not getting information from advisors, they are likely going to get it from someone else or somewhere else.